The more that SEO "opens up" to incorporate a broad range of both hard knowledge and soft skills, the more I feel like bringing this kind of work in-house is a much more prudent investment than outsourcing it to an agency. The integration needed with a number of important areas of a business' operation in order to improve ranking signals and drive engagement can be a really tricky thing to achieve from an external position and an even more difficult thing to sell.

One hugely effective thing that I have begun to make a point of is showing the client the discrepancy between their link profile and another, high-profile, high-DA site's, and asking them the question: do you think we're going to bridge even a tenth of this gap by building manual links across the web?This usually opens their eyes to the fact that SEO is about the optimisation of a range of processes. It can be a little bit of a Eureka moment when they realise that I'm not just blagging them about how SEO needs to be carried out in 2014. It might be a slight touch disingenuous because we don't necessarily need to emulate the link metrics of the biggest news site in their sector - but it certainly makes them think.

Web users have seen it all by this point, and they're much better than they used to be at spotting templated content that's had no love put into it. I think the main question is whether you can inject that life and spirit into the content by way of the second method you mention here. User Generated Content is a great way of making a templated local page exciting and vibrant, if you get it right. I think you should almost always use the third, "bespoke" method for the geos that really matter to your business model, but it's obviously not always practical to scale that, as Rand says.

I will never understand how anybody enjoys drinking whisky or whiskey :)

This is essentially another component of the move towards SEO being a holistic marketing exercise. As Google gets more sophisticated and learns to map phrases and ideas to websites, the branding and messaging side becomes more important and the technical details (think, for instance, about the example that Rand gives of not worrying so much about keyword cannibalization) become somewhat less of a big deal.

The keyword + brand search volume signal is not something I'd previously considered, but I guess that mirrors the way most people suspect that Google affords somewhat "arbitrary" (in a digital sense, anyway) ranking boosts to major offline brands.

I find your little aside about Google tracking clicks of a link and using that in ranking data really interesting. Obviously, if Google Analytics became ubiquitous, this would be made a lot easier. But it does seem like the logical next step in identifying which links have real value to real people.

In the name of staying ahead of the curve, we're really starting not to worry about nofollow/follow. If we're given the choice and it's within guidelines, we'll obviously take the followed link, but we're revising our services and how we provision them to a much broader scale of measuring success, which is tricky from a sales perspective, but seems the only non-dangerous way of developing an SEO strategy now.

It does feel - with the obvious exceptions of paid ads and the stuff that nofollow is "meant for" - like by this point nofollow links might even be a better representation of the web's real dynamics than dofollows. I know what their rhetoric says, but I'd be surprised if they don't factor it at least somewhat, and I've definitely seen evidence there too.